


your eyes close as i fall asleep

by you_idjits



Series: love, in fire and blood [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dean and Cas go hunting, M/M, Post-Season/Series 08, coda to my DCBB, so read that one first?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-27
Updated: 2014-11-27
Packaged: 2018-02-27 04:35:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2679314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/you_idjits/pseuds/you_idjits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Cas go on a hunt in Brunswick, Maine. It's a work in progress. They're a work in progress.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your eyes close as i fall asleep

**Author's Note:**

> This series is also a work in progress. I really like the completeness of my [DCBB](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2539790); it's a standalone piece. But I worked on it for so long that I wasn't quite ready to let go of that 'verse. So I'll be continuing with that in the form of various coda fics, like this one.
> 
> For new readers, I highly recommend you go read the first part of this series before this one.  
> Thank you, as always, for reading.

“I miss home,” Cas grumbles. The bedsprings groan as he rolls onto his side.

Brunswick, Maine, is a long way’s away from Kansas. They’re caught up in a tempest here, loud winds and louder thunder, trying to hunt down a ghost they can barely see through the gray rain. It’s miserable and they’re miserable. Yeah, Dean misses home too.

Lying on his stomach, he tucks his chin to the side to look at Cas. There’s a decidedly grumpy frown on his face, wrinkles between his eyebrows and at the corners of his lips. The motel smells like off-brand deodorant.

“Can’t sleep?” Dean asks across the space between their beds.

“Neither can you,” Cas says, which is a valid point.

“You wanna watch TV?”

“Not particularly.”

They rest in the sound of thick, tired breathing. Cas rolls onto his back, eyes to the ceiling, but Dean keeps looking at him. He buries the curls of a smile in his forearm. In the dim light, Cas is just soft lips and dark, scraggly hair. There is something mundane about this moment, something oddly simple, that makes Dean want to pull Cas into his bed and spread kisses over his skin.

He thinks he should be surprised. He doesn’t think things like that very often. But he’s not concerned, because he’s sleepy and warm and Cas is only a few feet away. Because they’ve been doing okay for a couple of weeks now, not really talking but not really not-talking either. And it’s been nice. Not perfect, but nice.

Which is maybe why he says, “You wanna sleep over here?”

There’s a shuffling, and then Cas is sitting up, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “You mean that?”

“Uh. Yeah. I think so.”

Cas holds his breath. So does Dean. And then Cas is throwing off the covers and swinging his feet over the side of the bed. “Dean.”

“Don’t overthink it, man. Just don’t.”

So Cas says nothing, but he crawls into Dean’s bed. His cold feet bump into Dean’s and they both mutter apologies. Dean shifts away, pushes himself to the far edge of the bed. He feels Cas stretching out beside him, testing the waters, and then the mattress dips and Cas rolls onto his side.

Back to back they lie, a palpable tension between them, and Dean doesn’t know what he expected but it wasn’t this. They feel like magnets flipped on the wrong sides, pushing away from each other. North to north.

He takes a deep, shuddering breath. Closes his eyes and tries to empty his mind, except Cas is much closer now, and he can feel the magnetic field between them now.

It’s really fucking uncomfortable. Cas is tense; Dean can feel it in the stillness behind his back.

“Fuck,” he sighs, and rolls onto his back. “Cas, this isn’t working.”

“I can go back to the other bed,” Cas offers, and _shit_ , no, Dean isn’t letting him do that. That would be ten times worse, to have tried and failed to get this sharing-a-bed thing right.

Dean can do this. It’s not a big deal. It’s just cuddling. He wants to make this work, between him and Cas. He wants that more than anything.

So he twists, shuffles closer to Cas, until they’re almost-but-not-quite touching. He hesitates, hand poised over Cas’s hip, like a question mark. Cas just lets out a heavy breath and adjusts his place on the bed.

Dean clenches his jaw, hard, and puts his arm around Cas’s waist. Cas’s stomach jumps, ticklish, under his touch, and Dean feels the muscles tense up. But then Cas covers Dean’s hand with his own. His thumb brushes the soft space between Dean’s thumb and forefinger. Dean takes that as a cue and shifts closer, lets his chest bump into the knobs of Cas’s shoulder blades. Slowly, painfully slowly, he slides one ankle up between Cas’s.

“This, um, this okay?” he asks. He can’t figure out what to do with his right arm.

“Don’t overthink it,” Cas repeats, and huffs a laugh.

And it’s awkward and tense and they both keep holding their breath, but at some base level this feels better. Like, yeah, like their magnetic sides are finally lining up, slotting into place.

They’re spooning in Brunswick, Maine, in the middle of a fucking thunderstorm. It’s not good but it’s not bad either, and for the first time in a long time there’s nothing between them. No bitterness, no fear, no frustration. No empty space. Dean feels his heartbeat thudding into the back of Cas’s ribcage.

Cas relaxes, his breathing evening, but Dean takes longer to fall asleep. Cas is warm and soft in his arms but he can’t relax, can’t accept that this is happening. Can’t accept that this is okay. So he watches the curve of Cas’s ear and tries to get his mind straightened out. Slowly, slowly, the morning light filters through the motel window, and only when it falls on the soft curls of Cas’s hair can Dean finally close his eyes and sleep.

In the morning they scope out the town, get a feel for the case. Someone’s been terrorizing college students, probably a vengeful spirit.

“We could go to the library, do some research on the school,” Dean suggests. Cas is holding some dumb polka-dotted umbrella he bought at a tourist shop. It does nothing against the wind, but he insisted on carrying it, and Dean isn’t gonna stop him. He just turns his coat up against the cold and deals with it.

“I have a better idea,” Cas says, and he points at a house that says _admissions._

No. No way they’re doing fucking _college tours_ in this weather.

But for some reason they are, so Dean and Cas sign up for the three o’clock tour. It’s subtler than playing FBI, easier than research, and, well, it gives them a good excuse for a lunch break.

In the car, Cas reaches for his phone – the one Dean bought for him after the Missouri debacle – and looks for restaurants near Bowdoin College. They then proceed to get hopelessly, obnoxiously lost. Dean gets snappish and Cas gets grumpy and eventually they find their way to the Brunswick Diner.

Which is the kind of diner Dean used to live out of: leather seats, lobster rolls – _fuck_ yes, Maine is the best – and breakfast served all day. There’s an actual working jukebox at the back, so Dean pops in a couple of quarters for Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Knuckles and noses red from the cold, they crowd into a booth and order. The jangly guitar of Bad Moon Rising settles underneath the murmur of the diner. Castiel keeps looking out the window at the storm.

“Maine,” Dean says. “Winters are shit, summers are nice. And this time of year can’t make up its mind.”

Cas gives him a soft laugh for his efforts. “We’ve been here in a thunderstorm before. You remember?”

Dean wracks his brain, because he’s been a lot of places in a lot of storms. But oh, now he remembers. When that stuff with Raphael went down. Before the _actual_ stuff with Raphael went down. “The brothel. Right.” He laughs. “That’s not far from here, huh? A little north?”

“I have no interest in going back, thank you,” Cas says. The waitress comes by with their food – chocolate chip pancakes for Cas, a lobster roll for Dean. They figured out after Dean starting cooking again that Cas likes sweet things. Really sweet things. He pours _sugar_ on his _chocolate chip_ pancakes and then _maple syrup_ on that. Fucking disgusting. Dean fucking loves it.

He loves it because Cas is eating, regularly, and Cas is making happy faces as he shovels pancake into his mouth. He loves it because Jimmy Novak didn’t like sweet things, Jimmy Novak liked burgers, and maybe it’s sentimental drivel but Dean kind of likes the things that separate Cas from Jimmy Novak.

Cas asks for a quarter and trudges to the back of the diner, to the jukebox. Dean doesn’t recognize the song, until he does. Homeward Bound, Fleetwood Mac, 1972. Not really Dean’s style, but-

Dean bursts out laughing. “Cas, I think you’re trying to tell me something.”

“What gave you that idea?” Cas says, and they’re both smiling, they’re laughing at each other. Dean shakes his head and kicks Cas under the table, but gently, affectionately.

“But I was thinking,” Dean says a few minutes later, picking at his lobster. “If things go well here, I mean, we could be done by tonight. And then. Well. There’s this place, couple hours northeast of here. Tourist trap, really, the easternmost point of the United States. I was thinking-” He rolls the words over his tongue, realizes how they’d sound. “Nevermind. It’s dumb.”

“Dean.” Cas puts down his fork. “What do you want?”

“Well. They say the sunrise is really nice. You know, over the Atlantic. Never seen the sun rise over an ocean before. And you, you’re new to humanity, you haven’t- I dunno, there are a lot of simple pleasures in life, like watching sunrises. I guess it’s my job to show you them. I feel like it is, anyway, not like you’ve got anyone else taking you to see sunrises and shit-”

“You’re rambling.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“You want to go see a sunrise?”

“Yeah. Kind of. If you want to. It’d be nice, I mean. We could finish up here, get a few hours shut-eye, drive over in time to catch it.”

“Okay,” Cas says.

“Okay?”

“I said okay.”

“Right. Okay.”

“Dean.”

“Sorry. Yeah. You done?”

Cas looks down at his pancake. “Yes. Come on, let’s go on our college tour.”

Their tour guide is far too bubbly for the weather, and they spend a lot of time hearing useless stuff about distribution requirements and outdoor programs, but it all pays off when she mentions the haunted building.

“It’s one of the oldest buildings on campus, and it used to be the science and medicine building. When we go inside, you can see this old, rusted hook hanging from the ceiling, because that’s what the med students used to hoist cadavers up to the fourth floor,” she explains.

Dean glances at Cas and knows he’s thinking the same thing. Some dead guy gets dissected, his ghost hangs around the college campus, when the body’s destroyed he sticks around. Maybe some organic matter gets left behind on the hook.

Nice and straightforward. Burn the hook, burn the spirit. It’s a gamble, but after twenty-odd years hunting Dean knows what to look for, knows to follow his hunches.

They come back at night, when the building is empty, to finish the hunt.

“There,” Cas says, pointing at the old hook. Yeah, that shit is creepy. Dean reaches for his lighter.

“How the fuck do we get to it?”

“I’ll take care of that. You keep an eye out for the ghost.”

“Remember, no guns, not on a school campus.” He slides an iron crowbar out of his coat instead, holds it at the ready. Cas returns a minute later with the hook in his hands.

“Nice. Okay. Kerosene’s in the car, let’s go.”

But as they’re stealing back to the car, the fucking ghost shows up. It’s a fast one, shoving Cas to the ground and then flitting to confront Dean. He swings the crowbar and the ghost dissolves.

“Hey. You okay?”

“Fine,” Cas says. He takes a while to get to his feet, though. “Come on.”

Dean nods, lowers the crowbar, and they keep moving. The ghost reappears near the car, and there’s no way in hell Dean’s letting some dead guy fuck up his baby.

“Kerosene, Cas!” Dean shouts, swinging at the ghost. It reappears behind him, and he twists just in time. Cas scrambles for the car, drops the hook at his feet and starts pouring oil.

“Come on, do it now!” Dean says, and tosses his lighter. Cas catches it with one hand, struggles to get the flame going, and then drops it. The hook lights up, then the ghost lights up. Game over.

“Ghost’s toast,” Dean says, and then laughs at his own joke. He makes his way to Cas and the burning hook. “Nice work, buddy.”

“Dean,” Cas says. “Dean, I think my wrist is sprained.”

Dean nods, a little too worn out to process what that means. “Okay. Can we get back to the motel, or do you want me to look at it now?”

“It doesn’t hurt so bad. I’ve had worse.”

He huffs a laugh, claps Cas on the shoulder, and circles around to the driver’s seat. They drive back in a tired silence, Cas holding his wrist carefully. In the brightly-lit hotel room it looks bad, already swelling, but it’s probably just a sprain. Cas sits on the edge of the bed and lets Dean kneel between his legs. Dean bandages it carefully. He keeps his touches light. Cas inhales short, surprised breaths with each one, but he handles it well.

“What about your other hand?” Dean reaches for that, finds a few scrapes that need disinfecting, nothing more. He doesn’t pay this much care to his own cuts and bruises, but Castiel is newly human and – yeah, okay, maybe Dean’s a little worried about him.

Maybe that’s what gives him the courage to press his lips to Cas’s bandaged knuckles. He hears a sharper breath at that, and then Cas brings his other hand up to Dean’s forehead. He brushes back the fringe of Dean’s hair, sweeps his thumb across Dean’s temple.

“Dean,” he says, in confirmation, like a certainty, like a comfort.

He lets go of Cas’s hand, pushes to his feet. “Come on. We could use some rest.”

They change; Dean crawls under the sheets and Cas hovers awkwardly between the two beds.

“Cas, just get in the bed,” Dean sighs, and pushes aside the covers. A flash of something passes across Cas’s face, too quick for Dean to process. He slides in beside Dean. This time, Dean feels less hesitant pulling Cas into his arms. It’s hard to sleep like this, with muscles tense, uncertain, but he knows it comforts Cas. And he knows he wants this. He does.

They wake early. They rise and pack in the darkness of the motel room. They take to the Maine highway under an inky black sky. Dean thinks about reaching for Cas’s hand, but he can’t quite bring himself to do it. The road stretches long and empty.

By five, they’re in Lubec, driving on back roads. The sky is just beginning to lighten when they reach the point. It’s not much, a lighthouse and some benches, grass dipping down into beach into water. They’re on the edge of Dean’s country, a country he’s crossed and criss-crossed for thirty years. He knows American highways like he knows the lines in his hands. And here he is tipping off the edge into the Atlantic Ocean with Cas. There’s something big about it, something he can’t quite grasp, something important.

Cas blows warm breath into his hands, and the gesture is so unmistakably human. Two months and he’s learning the tricks of the trade. In those first weeks Dean knows Cas struggled with depression, knows he felt like he was bad at it. Bad at being human. But Cas is better at adapting to change than anyone. He tries so hard and loves so much and learns so readily. He is better at being human than Dean, maybe.

“Cas,” Dean says, because he wants to find a way to tell Cas this, to tell Cas how much he means.

Cas looks at him quietly. Cas takes his hands and rubs warmth into them, cups them in his own.

There is so much emotion in physical touch. It weighs Dean’s heart down. It spreads a kind of heavy happiness through his bones. And he pushed Cas away before because it hurt too much, it hurt too much to get that kind of thing from Cas. Cas’s capacity for affection is so overwhelming it threatens to wash Dean away. But he can take it in pieces, like this. He can try to give something commensurate.

The sunrise is pink and orange and it turns the clouds the color of candy. It lights up a bright, glittering line on the water, the kind that hurts to look at. Cas tells Dean all this later, because Dean is too busy staring at Cas’s wide eyes and soft smile to notice.

This is the kind of scene he could never have imagined himself in. Maybe-kind-of holding hands with a guy - a _guy_ – and watching a sunrise. This isn’t the kind of man he thought he was.

Dean’s starting to realize a couple of things about masculinity, and one of them is that it’s not the thing his father taught him: heavy boots and heavier rifles. It’s not about being tough or surly. And it’s also not important. Masculinity and strength of character are not synonymous. Wanting to kiss Cas, wanting to hold and to be held, is okay. Years of conditioning make him fear the idea, but he’s working on fighting that, fighting the current. Fighting for what he wants.

So he can be a guy who cuddles and watches sunrises and holds hands with other guys. And he can be a guy who drinks beer and shoots guns and wears heavy boots. They’re not mutually exclusive.

He’s been coming to terms with a lot of pieces of himself lately. This vacation is really doing him good. Cas, too. They’re healing over.

He looks over at Cas, whose breath is curling like mist in the cold air. The corners of his eyes crinkle up with the start of a smile. “Come on, Cas. Let’s go home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from [Sonnet XVII](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/sonnet-xvii/) by Pablo Neruda. Thanks as always to my beta, [Tasha](http://kraziiisme.tumblr.com/), without whom I would probably die. Or something.
> 
> Crossposted on [tumblr](http://shootingstarcas.tumblr.com/post/103700563631/your-eyes-close-as-i-fall-asleep-a-coda-to-my)
> 
> Also, all details for Brunswick and Lubec are as accurate as possible. I miss Maine. :c


End file.
